About to celebrate his retirement with family and friends, a police officer is urgently called to a crime scene.
Presented out of competition at the last Berlinale, Last night in Milanthird feature film by Andrea Di Stefano (Escobar, The informant), captivates the viewer from the opening sequence, shot at night from a helicopter and not a drone. Milan has never been presented like this on the big screen. In the camera of Guido Michelotti, who filmed everything in 35 mm, the Italian city, which has inspired so many detective films, looks like an American metropolis.
Having met various police officers, carabinieri and members of the DIA (Directorate of Anti-Mafia Investigations), Andrea Di Stefano wanted to explore crime as it is experienced today in the economic center of Italy. The scenario he drew from these testimonies is solidly put together and will keep more than one person in suspense. And this, until the very last shot, as moving as it is chilling.
In doing so, the director took pleasure in revisiting with panache the codes of a genre that had the heyday of the years of lead, from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, that is to say the poliziottesco or spaghetti thriller. In fact, the kind of film where blood flows and rarely ends well. The kind of thriller where we meet atypical police officers. The filmmaker then had to find the perfect actor to play Franco Amore, an honest police officer who, after a 35-year career during which he never used his weapon, discovers the corpse of his friend and colleague Dino (Francesco Di Leva) at a crime scene. In the role of this antihero overwhelmed by events, Pierfrancesco Favino, the intensity in his eyes, the fever in his body, proved to be the ideal candidate.
From then on, Di Stefano leads the viewer down false trails. Shortly before being called by his commander to his home, where his wife Viviana (Linda Caridi, viscerally acting) had prepared a surprise party for him, Amore had already been present on the scene. The story then takes a leap backwards, allowing us to bring onto the scene characters to whom no one would dare to give the good Lord without confession.
The piece de resistance of Last night in Milan, even Andrea Di Stefano’s tour de force, is the sequence of scenes, shot with 360-degree cameras, taking place on the highway where Dino lies. Hunted from all sides, Amore furtively paces the scene, trying with every gesture he makes to outrun his adversary and escape his gaze, while he prepares, on this last night of duty, to become the a man he never thought he would be. Powerful.
Indoors
Check the movie schedule
Thriller
The Last Note of Amore (VF: Last night in Milan)
Andrea Di Stefano
Pierfrancesco Favino, Linda Caridi, Antonio Gerardi
2:04 a.m.